More Women Seeking Medical Help to Get Pregnant

A growing share of American women are seeking out some kind of medical help to become pregnant.

Roughly 12.5% of U.S. women aged 25 to 44 years old have sought some form of medical help to get pregnant, up from 11.2% in 1995, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention that cover everything from counseling to artificial insemination.

Bloomberg News

Among women aged 35 to 39 years old who have experienced one or more births, there’s an even bigger rise: 15.8% of these women have gotten medical help, up from 13.1% in 1995. For women in this age group who’ve never had children, the share getting help has risen slightly to 19.6% from 19.1%.

The findings, released Wednesday, are part of the CDC’s National Survey of Family Growth, which was conducted between June 2006 and June 2010. The CDC report treats this entire block of time as one data point, and compares it to a similar survey done in 1995, says CDC scientist Anjani Chandra. The surveys interviewed all women, not just women with fertility problems or those seeking to get pregnant.

One should approach the findings with care — they’re hard to interpret. While the CDC’s data are nationally representative, individual demographic breakdowns — for example, women in their late 30s who’ve had no children — are less reliable because they rely on smaller sample sizes.

Also, the CDC’s definition of “medical help to get pregnant” is broad — ranging from getting advice and infertility testing to artificial insemination, which is fairly rare. U.S. women who are white, better-educated and wealthier are much more likely to make use of infertility services. And infertility obviously also affects men, which prompted the CDC to start interviewing men in recent years, too.

Still, the agency’s latest figures highlight the effects of one of America’s biggest demographic trends: Young and middle-aged Americans are delaying childbearing, often until their 30s or mid-30s, or even beyond.

The average age of a U.S. mother at first birth has risen consistently, and is now 25.8 years old, as of 2012, up from 25.6 years in 2011 and around 21 in 1970, CDC data show. Thanks to better education, improved access to contraception, growing numbers of women in the workforce and the soaring cost of raising families, women are increasingly putting off having children—even though fertility generally declines in the 30s, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

“Each month that she tries, a healthy, fertile 30-year-old woman has a 20% chance of getting pregnant,” the ASRM notes in a report. “By age 40, a woman’s chance is less than 5% per cycle.”

One possibility is that delayed childbearing is reducing use of infertility services among younger women, and increasing it among older women.

While the percentage of women aged 30 to 34 receiving help to get pregnant rose just slightly to 11.1% from 10% in 1995, that may suggest women are trying to have children even later in their lives. The share of women 35 to 39 getting medical help for pregnancy rose to 16.4% from 14.3% over this period.

The CDC found that among women aged 25 to 44 who had fertility problems and had never had children, 38% had used infertility services, compared with 56% in 1982 — a sizeable drop. But this “may partly reflect the greater delays in childbearing over this time period, such that women in 2006-2010 were more likely to be older than women in 1982 when trying to have their first child, and also more likely to use services beyond age 44,” the CDC said.

Indeed, 23.4% of women aged 40 to 44 who have never had a child have sought medical help to get pregnant.

In 2012 — the latest data available — fertility fell to the lowest level on record—63 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, the CDC reported in late December. Another key measure, the number of children U.S. women are expected to have over their lifetimes, also slipped to 1.88 from 1.89 in 2011. While demographers expect these rates to rise as the economy improves, there are fears that longer-term factors like delayed child-bearing could outweigh these gains.

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